


The skies proclaim the work of His hands

by NormalAnomaly



Category: Glowfic and Related Works
Genre: Astronomy, Humans being humans, I am arguably spiteficcing myself, Jesusland setting, Outer Space, Religion, Science, glowfic, humanity fuck yeah, strange worlds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:02:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25060567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NormalAnomaly/pseuds/NormalAnomaly
Summary: An astronomer in a very small universe reflects on science and theology.This is technically in the same setting as certain glowfic, but the difference in tone is about as big as it can get.
Relationships: None
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	The skies proclaim the work of His hands

Ever since Adam and Eve in their unnumbered days of innocence, humans have looked up at the stars. The architects of Babel sought to reach them and found confusion; the Kings of the East followed one to find their infant Savior. Many cultures gave them names, and travelers between the hemispheres counted them: four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine before the birth of Christ, and a perfect five thousand after. Seafarers on a hundred coasts used them to find new shores and get home again. 

I loved the stars ever since I was a small child, reading about them in my copies of _The Big Book of Science Facts_ and _One Hundred Beautiful Things In Creation._ Lots of kids had a Space Phase, sometime before or after the Airplanes Phase and the Angels Phase; I was one of the ones who never stopped. I still remember the quote from a theologian at the front of the space chapter of _Beautiful Things_ : "God placed different crops on different continents, and different gems under different mountains, so that the peoples of the world would have treasures to share with each other. But He gave the same stars to all of us."

As I grew older, I got more books, and read everything I could find of what was known about the stars. I read about the experiments with parallax that found the distance to the stars in kilometers, and proved they were all the same distance from the sun. I read about the experiment with lanterns on mountaintops that determined the speed of light, and marvelled at the fact that two stars on opposite sides of the sky are exactly a year apart. Everything we learned about the universe was like a new revelation from God. I imagined Him smiling down at us from Heaven like a proud artist seeing His work admired--"Look, do you see what I did there? Isn't it neat?"

My passion for astronomy carried me through college, through a PhD, to a position at the Ezekiel International Observatory in Hawaii. I was there for the commissioning of the Leviathan Array, the largest telescope ever built, and I was in the room for its first observations of the red star Onekwenhtara. Imagine our joy and surprise when it appeared, not as a single point, but as a disc! 

Centuries of debate were resolved in an instant. But that was only the beginning. The colors of stars matched the colors of metal heated until it glowed, so we already had good estimates of their temperatures. Measurements of stellar diameters, which proved to be similar to that of the sun, could be combined with the temperature data to give a total energy. And that gave the scientific community the idea to do a longitudinal study of those temperatures. If the stars were losing energy to the crystal sphere they were embedded in, then given enough millennia the whole sky would eventually reach a uniform temperature. Long before that, the stars would cool enough that their light would slip into the infrared: to the unaided eye, the night sky would be empty blackness. 

Some of my colleagues speculated that the darkening of the sky would coincide with the End of Days. Sure, they said, we can know neither the day nor the hour, but maybe we can make a guess at the decade. I wasn't so confident. Judgement Day was prophesied to come as suddenly as a thief in the night, and the stars would vanish gradually, one at a time. Still, it did feel right to me that Earth would not outlive the stars. Maybe that sense was wrong--or maybe it came from the Holy Spirit, the fruit of a career spent striving to know the mind of God from His works.

I wonder, sometimes, whether humans will ever travel to the stars, or to the much closer moon and planets. Sometimes it seems like a dream as foolish as the dream behind the Tower of Babel--how could we spend the money such a project would require, when there is still poverty on Earth? But there is less poverty than there used to be, and Earth is getting crowded, and other times it seems like such a waste, like a rejection of God's gifts, to leave any corner of His universe unexplored.

**Author's Note:**

> The point of this setting was always to write Humanity Fuck Yeah fic. This is just a different flavor of it.


End file.
